David A. Windham

Now Streaming

The better half is on holiday and we’ve been doing some class A lounging. We’ve also recently added a nice 75 inch television to the bedroom which is a pretty good excuse for a midday nap now that the summer heat is settling in.  I’m watching Wimbledon1 and the Tour de France2 is good napping material. During a recent discussion on what to watch, a buddy of mine went on a rant about how it’s a mess navigating the streaming landscape insisting it’s all designed to just charge you more money. Although I cannot completely disagree, there’s never been a better system for having access to content. It’s literally the vast majority of the world’s media on demand.  You can watch the snow drift in Antarctica3 or take a train ride across Sweden4. Instead of turning my teen angst against the mind numbing television towards the internet, I like to remind myself how great it is to watch this transformation.  Navigating the infinite can seem pretty treacherous so I just wanted to share my approach to streaming. 

It’s amazing how much consumers just consume whatever is presented in front of them. I guess that’s why advertising works and I’m certainly not immune.  I’m often always asked if I’ve seen the ‘new show’ that is featured at the top of Netflix, Hulu or whatever. The same goes for whichever podcast or album Spotify or Apple Music is featuring.  Sometimes I’ll do a bit of stream surfing the apps and most popular categories to just kinda try and reverse engineer what folks are watching or listening to. Of course, I also get the in-person recommendations that I try to note. Most often, I’m in My Own Private5 Idaho of sorts. We’ll watch only one show at a time only occasionally breaking it up. We’ve just currently wrapped up Star Trek Deep Space Nine6 which is 176 episodes filmed in the 90s. Before that, we rewatched The Simpsons which is over 700 episodes. Needless to say, it’s usually easy for me to duck out of any casual conversations about whatever may be trending.  

I like to watch movies mid-summer and mid-winter mainly because it’s either getting dark early or because it’s too hot outside midday.  I never turn on the television just to fill up the room with noise.  I listen to music when I’m at the computers and podcasts when I’m cooking. I’ve worked up a pretty decent tracking and discovery system. I’m no slouch when it comes to film either. I would roll through 5 discs at a time from Netflix back when they came in the mail and I did the whole deep dive on great films and filmmakers because the web interface would allow you to sort by director, studio, producer, etc. After I had rolled through the old Academy Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards. American Film Institute5 catalog and Criterion Collection6, I moved on to foreign films. Even after almost thirty years, I still discover good old films I hadn’t seen. I’m also convinced that the further you move upstream, you had better be reading because the best ideas are where the pen hits the paper so perhaps a ‘now reading’ list my be my future too. 

There are plenty of publications that cover film and keep up to date watch lists.  Because the only close to universal search for film is IMDB9 and Wikipedia. It’s complicated by competing interests.  For instance, the search on Apple tvOS will not feature films licensed to Netflix. I’d imagine this is because they don’t want Apple to have analytics on their content.  This is true of a bunch of user interfaces from various providers. And then the licensing is often switching around too, so the provider is irrelevant except for the fact you often need to be a subscriber… which brings me right back to my buddy’s rant on it.  When you fret about the fees or lack of universal search,  just remember that it wasn’t too long when everyone was watching the same four channels, then the same 38 channels, then what the movie store had on VHS. Granted that I like to I support artist by paying for the content, I also realize that the vast majority of it goes to the studio and streaming provider. I crank them up and clear out what I want and shut them off because very few vendors require an annual subscription. 

I’ve just started a simple list of shows and films to replace my practice of bookmarking. I share it with the better half like we do our grocery list and I’ve decided that I’m going to chronicle it like I do my music listening and keep a list of favorites. This way I can share it with others.  As of now, I can’t figure out a way to pull my lists or watched from any APIs or whatnot, but I’m sure I’ll be able to in the future.  Just trying to avoid mindless consumption …unless of course I’m in the mood for mindlessness which happens more often than not. Speaking of, we just discovered Mike Myers’ The Pentaverate10 and aside from watching Wimbledon, our current attention is pointed toward solving the game Pikmin11.

If you want to take a look at what’s next, I’m going to keep the list @ https://davidawindham.com/til/lists/next 12.

  1. Wimbledon – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Championships,_Wimbledon 
  2. Tour de France – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France 
  3. Blizzard in Antartica – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ_MkkyhV0o 
  4. Sweden, Jordbro to Stockholm – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REuhC74uaa8 
  5. My Own Private Idaho – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Own_Private_Idaho
  6. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine 
  7. American Film Institute – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Film_Institute
  8. The Criterion Collection – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Criterion_Collection 
  9. IMDB – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb
  10. The Pentaverate – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentaverate
  11. Pikmin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikmin 
  12. David A. Windham – TIL- Up Next – https://davidawindham.com/til/lists/next